witch-ridden

Originally used to describe horses that remained thin and did not thrive despite feeding, from the notion in folklore that witches rode (and tired out) such horses at night.

witch-ridden

1. Thin and weak; (figuratively) thinly populated.
   • 1877, James Melville Beard, K. K. K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic Treating the More Important Events of the Ku-Klux-Klan Movement in the South With a Discussion of the Causes Which Gave Rise to It and the Social and Political Issues Emanating From It, Library of Alexandria, →ISBN:

     Even the chickens on their roosts were witch-ridden, […]

   • 1911, Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain), Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, page 88:

     Mrs. Piper would be a much more convincing apparition if she could have come to us out of the blue, instead of trailing behind her a nebulous ancestry of magnetic somnambules, witch-ridden children, and ecstatic nuns.

   • 2012 May 23, R. T. Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs (RLE Witchcraft), Routledge, →ISBN:

     Parliament in the seventeenth century an unsatisfactory barometer of public opinion because the franchise was irregularly distributed and the witch-ridden south-east over-represented.